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Firelands raid changes incoming

With the upcoming release of patch 4.3 and the final fight with Deathwing, Blizzard is reevaluating encounter difficulty in all Firelands normal and heroic mode encounters. Over the next few weeks, Blizzard will be toning down the encounters in Ragnaros' home turf to allow more groups to clear and complete the content before the final raid. It appears that the cuts will be coming to both regular and heroic modes, with about the same effect as the 4.2 changes to the first tier of Cataclysm raiding. The difficulty of Firelands will begin to be hotfixed the week of Sept. 19.

I think that the Icecrown Citadel approach, nerfing raiding content as the tier progresses, is an excellent move by Blizzard to keep raiders playing and trying encounters they may have fallen just short on progression. World firsts have already happened, and that race is long over. Now, groups that weren't working on the content as intensely now have their shot at checking out some of the great encounters in Firelands.

Firelands raid changes incoming

With the final showdown against Deathwing approaching, we've been keeping a close eye on players' progress through the current Firelands raid content. Before patch 4.3 is released, we want groups who are working on Heroic-difficulty content to be able to get as close to Ragnaros as possible, and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can. To achieve these goals, we'll be toning down the difficulty of both normal and Heroic raids through hotfixes in the coming weeks. In general, we plan to reduce health and damage of all raid bosses in both normal and Heroic Firelands by around the same percentage we brought difficulty down for the original Cataclysm raids when Rage of the Firelands (patch 4.2) was released.

We're looking forward to seeing more groups of players face off against the Fire Lord in the weeks ahead. However, before we make these changes, we want to give everyone a final shot at the bosses at their current difficulty level -- so this is a heads up that we're planning to apply the difficulty hotfixes beginning the week of September 19.

Stay tuned to the Patch 4.2 Hotfixes blog for these and other live updates to the game as they happen.